I recently bought a new computer, and on this new computer I decided to install OpenOffice instead of Microsoft Office. The unintended consequence is that my Asian Meter graphs were no longer rendered the same way. Instead of tinkering around with OpenOffice graphics, I decided to go back to my grad school toolbox and write a script to generate Asian Meter graphs using R. But part of this meant that I had to re-enter my data (long story) and I will probably have to continue fine-tuning my R script. That said, here’s the most recent Asian Meter graph comparing just Tricycle and Buddhadharma (I still have to re-enter the Shambhala Sun data).
As you may notice, Tricycle (the “most inclusive” Buddhist publication) has an Asian quotient of just over 6%, quite a bit less than its past average of about 9% (which is calculated from issues going back through Summer 2005). On the other hand, just over 20% of Buddhadharma‘s by-lines go to Asian Americans, although this quotient isn’t much higher than their running average, which is just under 20% (19.59%, averaged over the past four issues).
There’s been some good criticism of my motives for this continued monitoring of high profile Buddhist publications. As I’ve said before, this information is something that I’d like to know, there are other people out there who are interested, and it doesn’t look like there’s anyone else doing this. (Otherwise, I wouldn’t. It’s not like I get paid for this.) All this graphing is also a marvelously educational experience for me.
Dharma Folk 